....knows he will pay a lot more for one in the coming years.

And he will !

Phew thank god for that !!! Almost had to sell the dog.

There is far more at play in deciding wholesale prices than simply current currency rates. Indeed versus the Japanese Yen the current level is very close to the average exchange rate over the last eight years.

Profiteer ? Pentax are producing camera equipment. If it was food or clothing or energy supply you could possibly level that accusation, but cameras ? We have a choice to buy or not. These are luxury items..... ahem..... I mean.... vital survival items when discussing with the other half of course.

PPG is a dead duck. They have not even updated it for the K1 which is what over a year in production ?

I would forget about it, Pentax has.

Not accurate on the timing I am afraid. Since the referendum the pound has lost about 9% against the Japanese Yen. Declines against most currencies are around 12-15% over the last year. The current woes for Sterling started a good 12 months prior to the referendum.

But agree, every manufacturer has a pinch point where they go for a big wholesale price hike.

Sorry.....but they are very believable, and i for one am not gobsmacked.

But this has nothing to do with SRS who in the long run have always delivered good pricing on top of great service.

Final bit of advice....dont expect to master it all in a few months. I have at this malarky for 40 years and am still learning.

I would suggest an even more radical approach. The camera has a Manual exposure setting. The built in light meter will tell you what the camera thinks is correct or under/over exposure (which wont be correct in all circumstances but for 80% of pictures will probably be spot on).

Get used to manual exposure and you will understand how a change in shutter speed and aperture affect the exposure and how although one "stop" up and down of each will give you the same exposure, your picture will be different (depth of field versus movement blur).

I recently spoke to someone who had only ever used an auto exposure mode and said they were confused over how many stops of exposure compensation to use if the camera produced too dark/light images. They had no idea that the entire range of light between dawn and dusk can often be only seven stops.

Get to know details like this using manual control, and then you can use the auto modes like Av and Tv knowing exactly what you are getting.

We would not learn to drive using cruise control or learn to fly an aeroplane using Autopilot only would we ?

I like the first one and the sideways Hurricane. The last is pretty spectacular too.

A few seem to suffer from a very gray sky. I know we cannot control the weather, but perhaps over exposing them a bit might have brightened the background a little

UK still in the EU last time I looked